Quote

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: November 18
Essayist
Inventor
Literary Critic
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Ottawa (Ontario)
Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Doe
Rend
Enough
Claws
Heart
Hungry
Much
Eating
Mind
Turn
Things
Maybe
Life
Start
Turns

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If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
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The facts of this world seen clearly are seen through tears.
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Don't eat anything you aren't prepared to kill. Don't kill anything you aren't prepared to eat.
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The internet is 95 percent porn and spam
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I'm not senile, I snapped. If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.
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It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.
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My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.
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While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
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Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate it would be romance, bad luck.
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You aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it.
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I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.
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We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.
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In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.
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Confronted by too much emptiness ... the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
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I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.
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All fathers are invisible in daytime daytime is ruled by mothers and fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to fathers than meets the eye.
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We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet' we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here.
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Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.
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...how much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won't or can't love you. As a species we're pathetic that way: imperfectly monogamous.
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Perhaps they were looking for passion perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.
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